Letter to a Friend – June 2011

The following is a message I sent to a good friend while I was in the honeymoon phase of a nearly two-year stint with sobriety:

something bad was definitely happening to me due to my drinking. toward the end, pretty much every night of drinking could guarantee me an hour or two on the toilet the following morning. and i didn’t sit down to “beershits” either. it was far more horrible than that. the experience was flu like. or maybe akin to food poisoning. it sounded like a jet stream that finished with an underwater motorboat, and i’d need a shower after my first two sessions. rather than quit drinking at this point, i simply began planning my diarrhea days around the rest of my schedule. if i had to work out of town the next day, i wouldnt drink. if i had nothing to do on a sunday, i accepted that the first two hours of the day would be spent in agonizing self inflected pain on the toilet. if my drinking hadn’t caused other problems in my life, i’d have drank myself to death for certain.

this past thanksgiving i drank a half bottle of evan williams whiskey, on top of a large quantity of beer. i believe i may have already told you about this night, but i’ll provide a brief recap. i turned our small couch upside down. not violently mind you …. suzi and adora were in the next room and didn’t hear me do it …. when they walked into the living room i was (barely) standing beside it and giggling. after that i ate a worm. i was trying to feed my turtle by hand, and when he bit me, i ate his worm out of spite. then i passed out beside the coffee table on the living room floor. suzi tried to wake me up to go upstairs. my response was to grab the coffee table, throw it overhead, knocking my ps3 and laptop to the floor in the process, and began carrying it upstairs. our coffee table is fairly heavy, and i nearly lost it into our television in my drunken stupor. while carrying it upstairs suzi asked what the fuck i was doing, and all she could get out of me was, “this is what you wanted … what you wanted.” i set the coffee table down in our bedroom, and passed back out on the floor beside it. i was confused when i woke up next to it the next morning.

i cut back on my drinking. swearing to moderate, or i’d have to quit completely.

fast forward to fathers day. i woke up without a hangover, because i was still drunk from the night before. immediately after opening my eyes i grabbed a half a beer off of the coffee table, and slammed it. i followed that by another, and then fished out the pint of jim beam i had purchased and hid the night before. it was fathers day, and i deserved to start getting shitfaced upon waking. by 3pm i was fucking smashed, and passing in and out on the couch. suzi was pissed as adora wanted to spend the day with me, but ultimately let it go. we eventually went for a walk, which i only vaguely remember. as soon as we got back, i decided i was going to take another walk up to convenient to buy more beer. this was in spite of the fact that it was raining in torrents. the kind of rain that soaks your clothes completely through within a few seconds. i was hearing nothing of being driven down, so i walked. upon returning, i took a shower. when suzi went upstairs she saw that her radio was soaked. what had happened was that the rain was coming down so hard that it came in through the window in a way that it hadnt before and hasnt since. she didn’t realize that at the time, and honestly, her assumption that i intentionally got it wet for whatever reason wasn’t an unreasonable one. she also loved that radio (a gift from her family she’s had foryears), so that was the last straw for her. she came down stairs and yelled at me for ruining her radio. unable to articulate the fact that i didn’t get her radio wet, my response was to throw the coffee table, yes the same one, from one room into another. i may have broken a few other things, though i dont recall, and im quite sure i said some awful things to her while she cried into her hands for 20 minutes or more while sitting on the floor.

i swore that liquor was the problem. she’d asked me never to drink liquor again several years back after a night that made the previous two stories seem very tame, and i didn’t for a long time. after this past thanksgiving, i once again promised i’d never drink whiskey again. after fathers day, i admitted to her that i started sneaking whiskey around january, but i could see for sure now that whiskey was the problem, and that i had no desire to drink it, and that i’d only drink beer. i took a few weeks off of drinking all together. swearing to moderate, or i’d have to quit completely.

for the next few months i moderated fairly well, though this is when the bathroom problems began. i wasn’t drinking every single night, and there were even times that i wouldnt drink until i blacked out. half of the time even. maybe. i finally had my drinking problem licked. i mean it was killing me … but other than that.

fast forward to last sunday. we had went to a wedding the night before. i almost didnt drink at all, but for whatever reason, just an hour before the reception ended, i started slamming beers. probably 6 or more in a half hour (plus a shot of mcmasters). suddenly i decided that i was going to walk home from river city to the island. suzi was a little perplexed, but accepted it, and said she looked forward to spending time with me when she got home. after getting off of the suspension bridge, i nearly turned right to go home, but walked straight and made a trip to convenient instead. i bought a 12 pack, and by the time suzi got home, i was shitfaced. she was thoroughly disappointed, and didn’t let the point escape me, but nothing dramatic happened that night. the next morning i woke up and started finishing off the last of my beers from the night before. in a fairly tipsy state i made her breakfast, which actually turned out well, and started watching a show with her. i think i expected the sex that we didn’t have the night before, but i was obviously drunk, not even still, but again, so that was not going to happen. after i fully accepted that, i decided to go to convenient to get more beer. at this point, all she had to do was say one thing to set me off. i cant remember what it was, but it wasn’t at all out of line. i think it was something along the lines of, “maybe you don’t need any more beer today … you’re already drunk and its barely 1pm.” my response was to throw the microwave off of its stand and shortly after stomp the little shelf for shoes we had into oblivion. i cant recall the order of events that followed, but through the course of the evening i also slammed a ladder into the wall hard enough to put a hole through the lath and plaster, ripped the toilet seat off of our upstairs toilet (putting a hairline crack in the tank in the process), destroyed a dvd that we hadnt taken back to blockbuster, called her phone over and over again for a half hour straight and hanging up after shed left to pick up adora (id passed out beside my beer at some point and she took it before leaving), ripped my shorts off … like just off my body (i found those in the clean laundry several days later), and ultimately threw the coffee table again. it was all random … like things just broke around me as i moved through the house. i may also be missing a few things, but you get the jist.

luckily adora wasn’t home for anything except the coffee table, and she was upstairs when i did that.

when i sobered up enough to realize what i had done i was devastated. ill never hide the fact that im a little bitch who cries openly at movies (ever since adora was born anyway), but sunday night i didn’t cry, i sobbed, for at least a half hour. maybe longer. im not sure i’ve sobbed like that ever … even as a child. when i approached suzi, she was looking for apartments. she was done. after an hour or more of pleading, she said that if i went for help the next day, she’d stay the next day. maybe. after 15 years together, we’ve never been happier than we are right now. except for my drinking. which had gotten so out of control that she was ready to leave.

from the brief novel above it would seem asinine that it took me so long to realize that i simply can not drink at all. but these problems were fairly rare in the totality of my drinking. also, drinking in the morning was new … that’s not something i had ever done in the past, and im not sure where or when it started, but it would definitely continue if i were to try and drink again. most of the time, i would drink, pass out, and all would be well aside from the accumulating affects on my health. i built an identity around my drinking, and romanticized it somehow. and i was very functional. i didnt miss work, ive done very well in school, ive kept up on lifting, and (though often drunk at the time) i spent time with my family. drunken rages spotted my past, but less than annually, i think, which made them easy to overlook until they began adding up over many years, but also blatantly obvious once they became more frequent.

at this point i’ve accepted that i simply can not drink moderately. ever. ive tried every single way to moderate it, and every single way has failed. i even took 40 days off in 2010. on day 41 i drank so much that i actually passed out while mud bogging with a good friend. he said he’d never actually seen that before, and wouldnt believed that it was possible if he handt seen me bouncing around the cab of his truck, completely unconscious aside from the occasional giggle, with his own eyes. my hangover the following day was so horrible i swore i was ready for another 40 days of sobriety, but i was drunk again that night.

i have more to say about sobriety, but it’s almost 2am, and i have to be up at 6:45 for class. i’m actually curious to see if you’ve even made it this far! im sorry to unleash all of this on you. i didn’t expect my message to get this out of hand when i first sat down. these are events that i have not hid from anyone; however, ive never actually written them down before, and doing so brings a certain clarity to it all. i’d like to say that it’s cathartic, but it’s more emotionally grounding than releasing.

in any event, i certainly don’t miss the hangovers, nor the planned stays on the porcelain throne.